A Collaborative Citizen Science Platform for Real-Time Volunteer Computing and Games

Volunteer computing (VC) or distributed computing projects are common in the citizen cyberscience (CCS) community and present extensive opportunities for scientists to make use of computing power donated by volunteers to undertake large-scale scientific computing tasks. VC is generally a noninteractive process for those contributing computing resources to a project, whereas volunteer thinking (VT) or distributed thinking allows volunteers to participate interactively in CCS projects to solve human computation tasks. In this paper, we describe the integration of three tools, the Virtual Atom Smasher (VAS) game developed by CERN, LiveQ, a job distribution middleware, and CitizenGrid, an online platform for hosting and providing computation to CCS projects. This integration demonstrates the combining of VC and VT to help address the scientific and educational goals of games like VAS. This paper introduces the three tools and provides details of the integration process along with further potential usage scenarios for the resulting platform.